The Sun-Netscape Alliance, Santa Clara, CA was A joint venture of Sun Microsystems and Netscape to market Netscape's Web-based software products. The Alliance was formed when AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 to take advantage of the fact that the bulk of Netscape software was already running on Sun hardware. Netscape product names were replaced by the iPlanet brand name.

iPlanet software became Sun ONE software, which changed its name in late 2003 to the Sun Java System brand. We are unsure if the the Sun Java System brand contains much code form the original code base. The OpenDS LDAP is, AFAIK, an Open Source version of the SUN Directory Server.

The AOL rights and code were acquired by Red Hat and is now the Red Hat Directory Server. Red hat on, June 1, 2005, much of the source code was released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

As of version 1.0, December 8, 2005, Red Hat released all of the remaining source code for all components included in the release package and continues to maintain them under their respective licenses as part of the Fedora Directory Server.

The Fedora Directory Server project changed its name in May 2009 to 389 Directory Server to give the project a distribution and vendor neutral name and encourage porting or running the software on other operating systems.